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From: burton@pion.cat.cis.brown.edu (Joshua W. Burton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.announce
Subject: SUBMISSION: RTF etext for public distribution!
Date: 13 Oct 1993 18:28:36 -0400
Organization: Next Announcements
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I have just uploaded 48 MB of public-domain electonic texts to ftp.byu.edu,
where they now reside in /pub/next/Literature and are available for download.
These texts are very nearly a superset of everything now available from
the Gutenberg Project, the Internet Wiretap, the Online Book Initiative,
and the anon-FTPable part of the Oxford Text Archive. In short, there are
very few PD etexts on the Internet (to my knowledge---I'd love to be proved
SPECTACULARLY wrong!) that are not here. There are NONE missing that I
want and have been able to find, as of early October.
In addition to the convenience of one-stop shopping, this collection offers
a further advantage to the NeXTstep user, or to anyone who can take advantage
of Rich Text Format and Digital Librarian style indexing. I have been
collecting texts for about two years now, purely for my own enjoyment,
and have developed a set of automated tools and by-hand heuristics for
quickly turning book-size chunks of flatfile ASCII into chapter-sized
chunks of RTF, with left- and right-quotes properly distinguished, em-dashes
instead of multiple hyphens, italics instead of _emphasis_ or CAPS, and all
the high-bit characters, small-type footnotes, bold headings, and so on
that make a text pleasurable to read. Now, please note: I have NOT given
the full treatment to every text. ALL of them are better than I found them,
by at least a chapter breakup and a quick spell-check. Many are much better
than that (especially the ones that came with markup formats that lent
themselves to easy RTF conversion), and I have actually read some of them
from end to end on line, allowing me to add flourishes beyond what an
automated script can handle.
I have also included several homebrew icons for various books, and a detailed
guide to making good RTF out of flat ASCII. (At least I think my choices are
good---and if you dislike the format, I've tailored it for very easy and
consistent revision.) I am hoping that others will take over where I have
left off, and make sure that the collection of RTF literature grows in
parallel with the overall supply of PD etext on the Internet.
Please thank Don Yacktman for finding space for this collection on his server,
and for promptly moving the files into an accessible directory. I've also
tried to upload them to the Oregon State and Purdue servers (Purdue seems to
be full up at the moment), and have offered a full copy to a site at MIT as
well. I don't mind spreading more copies around---provided that they are
kept in the public domain, in line with the various licenses under which I
got them---but I can't leave them on this machine for more than a day or two
at most, so if you want the whole mess please download it from BYU instead
of asking me to upload it to you.
Hearty thanks are also due to Michael Larsen, who has done an enormous amount
of proofreading on the modified text (not to mention typing a book in by
hand!), and to Ayelet Lindenstrauss, whose icons (easily the best in the
collection) have been generously offerd up into the public domain.
I don't think that what I have done violates any of the texts' PD licenses,
but if someone knows differently please let me know AT ONCE, so I can have
the offending text taken off the net. While I have `improved' the formats,
and fixed some obvious typos, I have not tampered with the text, and I have
tried to make as few irreversible changes as possible.
Oh, two more things. (Sorry about the length of this post---I hope that the
topic is of sufficient interest to justify the bandwidth.) First, I don't
promise to maintain, improve, or do anything further with these texts; I
improved them for my own amusement, working hardest on those I cherished,
and I may continue to do so or I may decide to have nothing more to do with
them. They're being offered as is, but with no further obligation. Second,
I can _not_ honor private requests for particular texts; this has taken too
much time away from my physics research already. I've set them free---go
catch them yourself!
Here's the current list, for the curious:
Almanac: a Latin grammar, the CIA World Fact Book (divided by countries), the
1990 census (ditto), State Dept. travel advisories for 170+ countries,
the Big Book of Mischief, and world area code, US zipcode, and world
airport code lists.
Children: Aladdin, several Dr. Seuss books (these might not be PD, so I'll
delete them if the archiver says so), Flatland, Grimm's Tales, Alice,
Looking Glass, Snark, Peter Pan, and the Wizard of Oz.
Classics: Aesop's Fables, the Oath of Hippocrates, Plato's Republic, the
three Theban plays of Sophocles, and Vergil's Aeneid, all in English.
Essays: Daedalus, by Haldane, two lectures by Einstein, Bierce's Devil's
Dictionary, Descartes' Discourse on the Method, Fred Douglass's
autobiography, Darwin's Origin of Species and Beagle log, Thoreau's
Civil Disobedience plus extracts from Walden, Wollstonecraft's
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, some snips from the Kama Sutra,
and 16 assorted essays by Twain, all from his last decade.
Government: Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence,
Constitution, Mayflower Compact, Federalist Papers, 16 assorted
great speeches, the Communist Manifesto, the Israeli Declaration of
Independence, the PLO Covenant, the Magna Carta, the UN Charter, and
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
Hacker Jargon: both the current 3.0.0 file and the venerable 1.0 JARGON.
Novels: Christmas_Carol and two stories by Dickens, Stoker's Dracula,
E.R.Burrough's Gods_of_Mars, Princess_Of_Mars, and Tarzan, H.G.Wells's
Invisible_Man, Time_Machine, and War_of_the_Worlds, London's Call_of_
the_Wild, Sea-Wolf, and White_Fang, Austen's Pride_&_Prejudice and
Sense_&_Sensibility, Verne's two moon books, Kipling's Jungle_Book,
Conrad's Heart_of_Darkness, Lord_Jim, and Secret_Sharer, Hardy's Far_
From_the_Madding_Crowd, Twain's Connecticut_Yankee, Huck_Finn, Tom_
Sawyer, and Tom_Sawyer_Abroad, Melville's Moby_Dick (a clean edition
from the Oxford Text Archive, not the piece of scanned-in crap that
I put on the archive in '91!), Hawthorne's Scarlet_Letter and House_
of_7_Gables, Bunyan's Pilgrim's_Progress, Crane's Red_Badge_of_Courage,
Stevenson's Jekyll_&_Hyde and Kidnapped, Orczy's Scarlet_Pimpernel,
Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, plus the Canongate and Keepsake tales, Emily
Bronte's Wuthering_Heights, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Recipes: a 1.4 MB archive, in a man-pageish format that the Digital
Librarian can read.
Scripture: The King James, the Qur'an, and the Book of Mormon.
Tales: The complete Sherlock Holmes, 28 of Poe's best short stories, the
Gift of the Magi, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and 23 Jack London
stories, about equally divided between Klondike and South Pacific.
Verse: complete Sandburg and Crane, lots of Dickinson, Robinson, and Millay,
Hiawatha and three more by Longfellow, a few each by Poe, Frost,
Auden, and Whitman, the complete Bob Dylan lyrics; from across the
lake, Beowulf in the Dryden translation, the Canterbury Tales,
Marlowe's Faustus, Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained, complete
Marvell, Keats, and Yeats, the Rubaiyat, Prufrock, five by Kipling,
and a few each by Housman, Tennyson, Shelley, Sassoon, Blake,
Wordsworth and Wilfred Owen. Some modern verse as well.
Enjoy the books. Please send me some more when you find them....
`You can pay farmers not to grow crops, +-------------------------------------+
but you cannot pay authors not to write | Joshua W. Burton (401)435-6370 |
books. Yet something must be done....' | burton@het.brown.edu |
-- Anatole France +-------------------------------------+
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.